by Spectrum 64 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
My dad (an elder) always said that you should not serve God because of a date. He did not fall for the 1975 stuff as it was happening. He was considered by many jws to have a bad attitude about the whole 1975 date. Nearly everyone I knew at the time fell for it.... but obviously, my dad was right.
You might ask your nephew how a jw would have been viewed pre-1975 if they voiced their doubts about the date.
Coffee
Lucky for him he's got me and my pension.
Jgnat...you must really love that guy. How you put up with it, I don`t know, I sure wouldn`t have. Mucho respect to you for that.
Yes, the nephew is right.
They got what they deserved - they aligned themselves with an authoritarian, manipulative, deceitful organization and each turned his or her own free will over to it. The WTS organization cultivates the mindset that responds to reward/punishment conditioning - that is why they keep score - FS hours, status, etc. - and are obsessed with dates. But the R & F are culpable for buying in to it.
But what about the culpability of the WTS? I would not want their karma.
1975 - serves you right. No extra brownie points sycophants
I've heard this before many times, usually from the more judgemental JWs I knew. My ex used to say it was their own fault if some JWs chose to make dramatic lifestyle changes just before 1975. She said, "It's proof they were serving Jehovah with a date in mind." No thought is given to the fact that the WTS hyped 1975 and later blamed it's own members for believing their "spirit directed organization".
W
Lucky for him he's got me and my pension.
Interesting that you say that......It's something I've been thinking about with my wife.
I'm just past 40....and a tad late getting in the game of saving for retirement. Oh, I have a small pension being taken out of my salary for retirement purposes, but it'll be no where near enough to live the lifestyle I'll want when I retire. My plan is to start dumping money into a retirement plan as early as this summer on.
On the other hand, my wife is still of the "armageddon is just around the corner" mantra, the same as her mother and father and their mother and father. Between my elder in-laws only two actually saved for retirement and one is so tight with money, he'll make a penny scream. both of their spouses are whining about not having money of their own but they refuse to look back and take any responsibility for it because all they wanted to do with their life was "wait on jehovah".
My wife seems to be moving closer and closer to studying more, mettings more, and I suspect service more, and I've told her that that is not the life I'll be living when I retire.
It boils down to this: your nephew obviously think's the people who left the organization because of 1975 are selfish. The people who left because of 1975 woke up and realized that the governing body are a group of kooks manipulating the lives of people and are no more spirit directed than any other Christian denomination, and were in fact much worse because of that "spirit directed" bullshit claim.
He's doing the good old JW shuffle. They all do it one way or another. Surprise, surprise.
GBL
He said "They deserve it. They thought that they were going to get extra brownie points from God for giving up their comforts for a short period. It should have been in their hearts from the beginning to save people and not try to make a big show of it to God right at then end."
What an idiotic and heartless thing to say! It's like saying a soldier who got his legs blown off deserved it because he was just after the Purple Heart.
He's saying they deserved to be lied to and deceived because they feared for their very lives. He's saying they deserved it because they listened to the WTBTS when the strongly stressed (some would use the word coerced) that people should do exactly that in talk after mind-numbing talk and every other Watchtower article. He's saying they deserved it because they put all their faith into Jehovah and the WTBTS under false pretenses.
The WTBTS stirred things up further. There were dramas stressing the flood in Noah's day among other things. There was a book entitled "God's Kingdom of 1000 Years Has Approached." There was a shortened period of Bible study because the end was so close (only 6 months to study the Truth book and make progress or the householder should be cut loose). There was also the special tract work. Tracts were to be delivered to every house in every territory in the world in a matter of 2-4 weeks. This was done seven times, like the march around Jericho. Circuit Overseers reinforced the urgency of the times by showing them how (with charts; rare visual aids used only for the most important things) through Bible chronology, that the end was coming in 1975.
He's assuming the jobs and homes they gave up were comforts, and not necessities to keep their families fed and sheltered adequately. He's assuming that there weren't any following the example of the widow's mite. This happened all over the globe in both industrialized and third world countries, to people in all walks of life, but especially those who were uneducated due to WTBTS prohibitions against college educations. And many people who sold their belongings donated a good share of the proceeds to the WTBTS. In Malawi people were beaten, raped, and died preaching that the end would come in 1975!
He also assumes that they were motivated by a need to get brownie points! How presumptuous! Many of the people who did this did it because of their conscience. They felt they had to do whatever they could to save as many as they could before the end, otherwise, how could they live with themselves. Billions were going to die in 1975. They were their neighbors, their relatives, the mailman, their grocer, and so on. Nobody wanted them to die if their was a chance they could be saved.
And just what does he mean by "to save people?" Save them from what? At the time people thought they were saving them from certain destruction. In actuality it was to save them from working hard to support their families, to provide them with food, and education, and a roof over their heads, to spending valuable recreation time with their family while their children were still young and at home. To save them so that they could also go from door to door deceiving other people into doing the same thing. To also give up their jobs and turn their funds over to the WTBTS and then be disappointed when the end never came and still hasn't over 30 years after and never will!
If those people served it, then all of the people who died at Jonestown deserved it too for thinking God would give them brownie points for drinking the KoolAid. The Branch Davidians also deserved it for thinking that God would reward their blind faith in him to deliver them from harm.
What a slap in the face to all of those who sacrificed for this deception!
Tammy
"They deserve it. They thought that they were going to get extra brownie points from God for giving up their comforts for a short period. It should have been in their hearts from the beginning to save people and not try to make a big show of it to God right at then end."
Well, two JW came to my door and said basically the same thing about two months ago. One said, they should have been serving Jehovah and not with the end in mind! That was just selfish!
And I'll tell you what. I agreed with her. Then I proceeded to tell her it was a real shame they were deceived by a man-made religion that took the focus off of GAWD by telling people "Millions now living will never die." Pointed out that the old lady on my doorstep was almost 80 and would die, now wasn't that a shocker!!!!
Also told her it was a real shame for people to not THINK realistically about the future when they hear such 'emotional catchphrases' as "Live Forever in Paradise on Earth" and "The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life."
Warned her to MAKE SURE she allows her children some normalcy in this life instead of being one of the suckers that bought into 1975. They agreed.
Hey, first principle of SALES. Agree to the objection. Courtesy of the TMS. You won't get anywhere if you don't agree with these dodos.
They were rather stunned when they left.
Lisa
Best thread in several weeks, IMHO. But I am concerned -
Are we somehow going down that ski slope of "the publishers who believed it just made it themselves"?
So, why did they "get what they deserved"?...these people DID NOT make it up themselves. Some must have sincere in believing it, no?
What about people (like me) who were already fading in the 1970-1975 years and really never believed that anything was going to happen? Did we somehow fail the lord by NOT believing it? Even though it turned out to truly be a steaming pile?
Or, were we somehow better off because we DISTRUSTED the FDS?
Whats the old saying - fool me once (shame on me); fool me twice (shame on you)? [1914 etc. vs 1975]
Maybe this is where your nephew is going with his excellent observation...
Spoken like a 17 year old , who has only read about this from the books, and is too young to have known what it was like at the time. Those of us who were there experienced the most exciting time in recent dub history .. We just knew that it was really here ! Of course the Society had to be cautious in print, but in the words of an elder friend of mine "I just cannot see that Jehovah would allow the Society to be wrong about this matter".. 31 years later, he is still waiting faithfully.
It was not a question of brownie points. People really genuinely believed and could not see the point of keeping assets that would only be lost at Armageddon. They did what they wanted with their time. For example, if you really knew that you had only months to live, would that not influence how you behaved?
This is is typical JW revisionist history, Never admit that they led us astray, blame the 'brothers' who were gullible enough to believe.
